Problems:
How people did translations?
Can't we measure the "efficiency" of languages?

Human Language and Language Science

The shared system in communications is called the mental grammar. （人类通过一套系统能够理解相互之间想表达的事情）

• modality of language (动作还是发声？)

The part people link words (forms) with its meaning (entity) is mental lexicon, and normally this relationship between forms and meanings are arbitrary (e.g. the word 'pumpkin' has nothing to do with orange round plant). We need to know the articulatory phonetics to pronounce a word.

We can do acceptability judgements, surveys, checking corpus as our empirical observations. We can also use a bunch of software to analyze audio and video recordings like Praat, ELAN, SLP-Annotator. Making experiments also help with the help of participants, or technologies like neural imaging. We are doing all these to discover metalinguistic awareness.

Appendix:
high prestige
language and power
all languages and dialects are equally valid

2025-01-06 - 01-07